Delacorte Press
February 2008
On Sale: January 29, 2008
Featuring: Dr. Ephraim Carroll
352 pages ISBN: 0385341342 EAN: 9780385341349 Hardcover Add to Wish List
A mesmerizing forensic thriller that thrusts the reader into the operating rooms, drawing rooms, and back alleys of 1889 Philadelphia, as a young doctor grapples with the principles of scientific process to track a daring killer
In the morgue of a Philadelphia hospital, a group of physicians open a coffin and uncover the corpse of a beautiful young woman. What they see takes their breath away. Within days, one of them strongly suspects that he knows the womanโs identityโฆand the horrifying events that led to her death. But in this richly atmospheric novelโan ingenious blend of history, suspense and early forensic scienceโthe most compelling chapter is yet to come, as young Ephraim Carroll is plunged into a maze of murder, secrets and unimaginable crimes....
Dr. Ephraim Carroll came to Philadelphia to study with a leading professor, the brilliant William Osler, believing that he would gain the power to save countless lives. As America hurtles toward a new century, medicine is changing rapidly, in part due to the legalization of autopsyโa crime only a few years before. But Carroll and his mentor are at odds over what they glimpsed that morning in the hospitalโs Dead House. And when a second mysterious death is determined to have been a ruthless murder, Carroll can feel the darkness gathering around himโand he ignites an investigation of his own.
Soon he is moving between the realm of elite medicine, Philadelphia high society, and a teeming badlands of criminality and sexual depravity along the cityโs fetid waterfront. With a wealthy, seductive woman clouding his vision, the controversial artist Thomas Eakins sowing scandal, and the secrets of the nationโs powerful surgeons unraveling around him, Carroll is forced to confront an agonizing moral choiceโbetween exposing a killer, undoing a wrong, and, quite possibly, protecting the future of medicine itselfโฆ.
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